Dear all, I'm finding the discussion regarding time a bit confusing in our discussions so far. For me, there are four very distinct notions of time: 1) Enactment date or approval date. This is the date that a document becomes official. It might be the date a vote in the legislature approved a version of a bill or it might be the date the the chief executive signed the bill into law. In California, they would call the enactment date the "effective" date although the law generally does become enforceable on this date - that's the operative date. 2) Publication date. This is the date that a publication of the document first becomes available in print. Often it will be the same date as (1), but it does not have to be. The U.S. Code is republished every six years with all the amendments executed from the prior six years. That publication date does not correspond to any legislative action. 3) Operative dates. These are the dates that the law comes into operation or goes out of operation. It is not necessarily the same as the enactment date. Indeed, in California, while most laws become effective upon signing by the Governor, most laws become operative (are enforced) Jan 1 of the following year (unless declared an urgency measure). Individual provisions within an act may have their own operative dates (or complex conditions which we can ignore for now) that cause the provisions to be either operative or not. 4) Point-in-time date. This is a date requesting the law as it exists at any point in time. It is, by necessity, a date to be used as a query as it need not correspond to any specific legislative activity. It is my opinion that the expression date most closely corresponds to #2 above - the formal publication date. We can argue that it should correspond to #1, but my counter argument is that newer editions might be produced independent of specific legislative activity on the document. Further, it is my opinion, that any specified manifestation date corresponds to #4 above - a query into the XML requesting a synthesized rendition as would be operative at the specific point-in-time. I don't think there is any need to specifically handle #3 above in the URI - this is metadata used when querying for #4. Is my understanding correct? Is our terminology aligned? -- Grant ____________________________________________________________________ Grant Vergottini Xcential Group, LLC. email:
grant.vergottini@xcential.com phone: 858.361.6738